I've been called fat my whole life. I am fat, so it's kind of silly to get mad about it.
I do admit that black men love me. I always forget that, and then I come to a black neighborhood and I remember.
When you become an adult and you have a choice of who to have in your life, if someone's hurting you and making you feel bad, then they shouldn't be in your life, even if it's a family member.
Miss Piggy's a big girl, and glamorous, and people think it's silly when I say she's a role model to me, but she was.
One thing I think constantly is if brands like Gucci can make plus-size menswear, then why can't we see it for women?
Why would I want to walk the runway for a brand to be their token plus-size girl when they're not even making my size?
I think it frustrates me that so many people have bought into the idea of what we should look like instead of actually giving a crap about everyone around you.
In the beginning I used to say, 'I'm healthy, my cholesterol's fine, I don't have high blood pressure, I don't have diabetes.' By telling people that you see a doctor, and telling people that you're healthy, it's perpetuating the abuse against bigger bodies and the mindset that we owe it to people to be healthy.
I can live my life, I can be at Disneyland and eat fried chicken, and that's my choice.
I was angry and sad that people kept commenting on my pictures saying, 'You're too fat to wear that!' or 'Cover up! No one wants to see that!'
I'm at the heaviest I've ever been in my life now and it took me being the heaviest to finally love myself.
The societal obsession with appearance is definitely something that weighs on your mind as a model.
Ultimately, I don't really want to see the media portraying curvier and fatter bodies being the norm, I want to see a variety of bodies of all shapes, sizes, colors, and orientations, all of the time just like we do in reality.
I think that people think that since I literally wrote the book on how to love yourself that I love myself all the time, but I don't.
Obviously there aren't many opportunities for someone who looks like me to walk in fashion shows. It's incredibly frustrating.
Designers still won't dress me, and if they do, they will send a dress that doesn't fit me because it's the only sample that they have in their office that we can get to in time, and then it's hard because I don't want to support certain brands that I don't feel like are diverse in their messaging.
I can never celebrate a success in my career without it being picked apart because of my size or 'my health.'
I have created a life for myself that I only thought was literally a dream.
People laugh in my face sometimes if they don't know who I am. When they find out that I model they're like, 'well what do you model?'
I feel like it's important to talk about my health, which is fine, and my size because there are young girls who see someone like me and can validate their own existence.
